What is the source of the title of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)?
Richard Wright took the title Native Son from Nelson Algren, after the title was rejected for Algren’s novel Somebody in Boots (1935).
Richard Wright took the title Native Son from Nelson Algren, after the title was rejected for Algren’s novel Somebody in Boots (1935).
Captain Ahab’s first mate in Melville’s MobyDick is Starbuck, the second is Stubb, the third is Flask.
The Babylonian epic The Epic of Gilgamesh dates back to about 2000 B.c. It concerns the adventures of the hero Gilgamesh and the “wild man” Enkidu, and Gilgamesh’s grief over Enkidu’s death.
In the Paradiso (1321), the highest of Dante’s heavens is the Empyrean, the tenth heaven. It contains God’s Court, seen as a many-petaled rose.
Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis are father and son. Kingsley Amis’s books include Lucky Jim (1954) and Jake’s Thing (1978); Martin Amis’s novels include Success (1978) and Money (1984).
Anne Tyler’s first novel was If Morning Ever Comes (1965), written in her early twenties. Born in 1941, Tyler was respected by critics but did not become widely known until Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1982.
“Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness is the quotation at the start of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”.